This is oddly similar to a recent policy of my own, in which I do business only with Non-Asshole companies.

Quote:

The best thing you can do for employees — a perk better than foosball or free sushi — is hire only "A" players to work alongside them.' Continuing her Scrooge-worthy tale, McCord adds that firing a once-valuable employee instead of finding another way for her to contribute yielded another aha! moment for Netflix: 'If we wanted only "A" players on our team, we had to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit, no matter how valuable their contributions had once been.

um, i know multiple people at netflix. they only hire "senior" engineers and fire underperformers aggressively. if you're not a "senior" engineer, you're a manager, or you don't work at netflix. they have a solid continuous integration pipeline and aggressively use the simian army. if a shitty dev happens to get hired, this usually weeds them out within a week. simian army randomly shuts down production resources. any dev who can't write code that handles this is booted fast for being too shitty.

the result is you don't have to hand-hold newbie devs, and instead, spend most of your time innovating. nothing wrong with that.

um, i know multiple people at netflix. they only hire "senior" engineers and fire underperformers aggressively. if you're not a "senior" engineer, you're a manager, or you don't work at netflix. they have a solid continuous integration pipeline and aggressively use the simian army. if a shitty dev happens to get hired, this usually weeds them out within a week. simian army randomly shuts down production resources. any dev who can't write code that handles this is booted fast for being too shitty.

the result is you don't have to hand-hold newbie devs, and instead, spend most of your time innovating. nothing wrong with that.

Ah, so only tech people have the 'A' requirement. Not surprising for a company with that ethic._________________42

What is the interest in this document? Is NetFlix an admired company in the US?_________________"Defeat is a state of mind. No one is ever defeated, until defeat has been accepted as a reality." -- Bruce Lee

Agreed on many of pjp's points as well, with the caveat that big dave explained, well, the virtues of their system.

My main issue is the arbitrary nature of how it is applied. The bookkeeper was presumably an 'A Player,' but they wanted to get rid of her because she didn't have a CPA. An 'A Player' is such regardless of certifications, etc. So while she may not have been able to fill a CPA role, it is drone-like to assume she wouldn't be an 'A Player' in a different role. This had nothing to do with people who can't do their job. That has nothing to do with 'A Player' quality._________________42

um, i know multiple people at netflix. they only hire "senior" engineers and fire underperformers aggressively. if you're not a "senior" engineer, you're a manager, or you don't work at netflix. they have a solid continuous integration pipeline and aggressively use the simian army. if a shitty dev happens to get hired, this usually weeds them out within a week. simian army randomly shuts down production resources. any dev who can't write code that handles this is booted fast for being too shitty.

the result is you don't have to hand-hold newbie devs, and instead, spend most of your time innovating. nothing wrong with that.

Ah, so only tech people have the 'A' requirement. Not surprising for a company with that ethic.

i doubt it. i just know this for the tech guys because i know a lot of devs.

Well, that's where I'm not sure if that's the case. It seems, to me, that they value performance above all else.

The bookkeeper was a referenced example. It isn't a guess on my part.

Quote:

The second conversation took place in 2002, a few months after our IPO. Laura, our bookkeeper, was bright, hardworking, and creative. She’d been very important to our early growth, having devised a system for accurately tracking movie rentals so that we could pay the correct royalties. But now, as a public company, we needed CPAs and other fully credentialed, deeply experienced accounting professionals—and Laura had only an associate’s degree from a community college. Despite her work ethic, her track record, and the fact that we all really liked her, her skills were no longer adequate. Some of us talked about jury-rigging a new role for her, but we decided that wouldn’t be right.

Employers are increasingly looking away from people who can "figure it out and get it done" and looking solely at check boxes on a list of exact requirements. This is, IMO, a bad decision all around. And I might add, not of a skill I would consider for an 'A Player.' It seems akin to shortsighted management methodologies of the 80s and 90s designed to garner short-term profit to make an individual or specific group of individuals look good. More often than not, management.

big dave wrote:

pjp wrote:

big dave wrote:

um, i know multiple people at netflix. they only hire "senior" engineers and fire underperformers aggressively. if you're not a "senior" engineer, you're a manager, or you don't work at netflix. they have a solid continuous integration pipeline and aggressively use the simian army. if a shitty dev happens to get hired, this usually weeds them out within a week. simian army randomly shuts down production resources. any dev who can't write code that handles this is booted fast for being too shitty.

the result is you don't have to hand-hold newbie devs, and instead, spend most of your time innovating. nothing wrong with that.

Ah, so only tech people have the 'A' requirement. Not surprising for a company with that ethic.

i doubt it. i just know this for the tech guys because i know a lot of devs.

Identifying only senior engineers and managers as employees seemed to suggest something. My apologies for misinterpreting your intent. "Senior" implies a certain amount of knowledge or skill, etc. Manager implies nothing of the sort. Lots of people are promoted to their level of incompetence, often as managers._________________42

um, i know multiple people at netflix. they only hire "senior" engineers and fire underperformers aggressively. if you're not a "senior" engineer, you're a manager, or you don't work at netflix. they have a solid continuous integration pipeline and aggressively use the simian army. if a shitty dev happens to get hired, this usually weeds them out within a week. simian army randomly shuts down production resources. any dev who can't write code that handles this is booted fast for being too shitty.

the result is you don't have to hand-hold newbie devs, and instead, spend most of your time innovating. nothing wrong with that.

Ah, so only tech people have the 'A' requirement. Not surprising for a company with that ethic.

i doubt it. i just know this for the tech guys because i know a lot of devs.

Identifying only senior engineers and managers as employees seemed to suggest something. My apologies for misinterpreting your intent. "Senior" implies a certain amount of knowledge or skill, etc. Manager implies nothing of the sort. Lots of people are promoted to their level of incompetence, often as managers.

i was talking about the engineering department specifically because that's where it's most prominent. most coders suck too much to withstand the simian army.

the example above basically says some community college low wage accountant couldn't keep up and they needed CPAs. nothing wrong with letting her go.

I never said she was a CPA. Not being a CPA doesn't mean she was incapable of doing something else well.

having transitioned a company from a couple million in revenue to many more millions in revenue, a lot of roles were replaced with higher qualification requirements. once we hired a CPA, multiple accountants were not only redundant, but slowing the CPA down. it's no different from entry level engineers dragging down senior engineers.